In The Image Of Man
by Unoriginality
Summary: When Hohenheim finds a girl washed up on the riverbank, he finds more than he bargained for.  Set pre-series, original anime-based.


Deborah's heart pounded loudly in her ears as she fled. Behind her, the mob from her hometown crashed through the fields, chasing after her. "Witch!" they yelled after her. "Demon child!"

There was a river up ahead, she knew in a flash of premonition, and it may be her only hope for survival, if she can make them believe she drowned. She had no time to wonder where she would go from there, banished from her hometown and probably to be driven out of anywhere else she might go for her supernatural visions; at that moment, survival was the only thing going through her head.

She crested the bank and took a leap of faith into the icy blackness below.

* * *

><p>She had no idea where she was when she came to. She could tell she was on a bed, and it was a decent one, better than one she'd ever had in her life. She opened her eyes and looked around. Tables of all sorts were around the room, holding various glass containers that were oddly shaped and she couldn't even begin to guess what they were for. The walls were covered in elaborate circles and drawings, symbols that smacked more of witchcraft than anything she'd ever done.<p>

Deborah sat up quickly, holding the sheet to herself when she realized she was wearing only a thin gown. "Hello?" she called, looking around again, trying to adjust her eyes to the dim oil lamp light.

"Ah, you're awake. Good." A man's voice. Deborah's head snapped around, locating the source. He was a tall man, blonde, with eyes that looked gold in the light. It might've been an illusion though; she'd never heard of a man with gold eyes. Gold was an unnatural eye color.

"Who's there? What have you done with me? Where am I? Where are my clothes?" The questions poured from her mouth, demanding answers more anxiously than imperiously, although heaven help her, she tried to sound not quite so afraid.

"You're in my lab," the man told her. "Forgive me, your clothes were wet. I had my maid fetch you a nightgown."

The heat that had risen in her cheeks died down a little. "This maid. I'm sorry, is she the one that dressed me?" She desperately hoped so. She may have been accused of witchcraft, but she was a good girl, really! She wasn't a whore like her mother.

The man smiled, and it seemed more amused than reassuring. "Yes, she did. You've nothing I've not already seen anyway," he said, turning back to the table he stood at. He marked on the wall, more symbols that Deborah couldn't decipher, then looked back at her. "Now, it is my turn to ask you a question. What were you doing in my family's river?"

Wait. A maid. His family's river. Oh God, have mercy, she was talking to a nobleman. She scrambled for her manners and wits. "Beggin' your pardon, milord," she said quickly. "I was- I was running from someone and jumped in the river. I don't know how far away I was when I did that. I didn't mean to trespass."

The man turned again, and walked over to her. "What is your name? Who were you running from and why?"

Deborah shrank back as she realized just how large this man was. She'd never seen anyone so tall! "I- my name's Deborah. I was running from my townspeople, I." She hesitated. "They think I'm a witch. But I'm not, I swear I'm not!"

He snorted in disgust. "Another witch hunt. Well, I'll have use for you, at least."

Something about his tone when he said that made her skin tingle with the urge to run as fast as she could. "I'm nobody's whore!" she protested. "I'm not my mother! And I'm not a witch, either. I-" Another hesitation. Maybe this man would take pity on her instead. "I see things, sometimes, and they're accurate, but that doesn't make me a witch. Even the disciples saw visions, didn't they?"

That had the man's interest. "You see visions? Of the future?"

He didn't seem disgusted or reviled by her for it, so she reluctantly nodded. "I do. And they're always accurate. I don't know why, I've had them since I was a babe."

A smile crept along the man's face, thoroughly unpleasant, and Deborah wasn't sure how safe she felt, suddenly. "Interesting. Well, Deborah, I have a task for you. Would you be my assistant in a few experiments? Oh, forgive me. I should explain. I'm an alchemist. My name is Hohenheim. I'm most interested in your abilities. I believe there's a scientific reason for them, not some hocus pocus witchcraft nonsense. If I can prove it, and understand the source of your powers, perhaps I can replicate it, and remove the stigma about it."

Some of those words didn't make sense to her, but she understood that he was not interested in hurting her, and it sounded like it might even help her. Given that she had nowhere else to go, she didn't have much choice but to accept. "I'll help however I can, milord."

"Please, just Hohenheim," he said. "I don't care much about my family's status, except the education it bought me."

Deborah smiled, a bit tentatively as she warmed to the man. "All right, then, Hohenheim. I like that name."

"It's a name," he said somewhat off-handedly. Deborah felt her smile slipping. Hohenheim wasn't terribly friendly, it seemed, but he offered her a job, one that seemed honorable enough. Certainly, it was better than turning tricks like her mother, or who knows what her father did. "You'll stay in the servants quarters. Rosa will assist you. Tomorrow, I want you here, in my lab, at sun up. Is that clear?"

She nodded. "Yes, Hohenheim. I'll be here."

* * *

><p>Hohenheim spent the next several weeks working with the gutter trash known as Deborah. She was uncanny. Her abilities were incredible. She was almost never wrong when he held up a card to her and asked her what was the symbol on the other side, and she'd more than once saved him from an accident with her premonitions.<p>

He must replicate those abilities for himself.

"Tell me, Deborah. Can you read minds, as well?" he asked her one day as she arrived in the lab, a few minutes late, he noticed.

She blinked, red faced and stammering, then shook her head. "I don't know, Hohenheim. I've never been asked to. I've been accused of it, though."

He nodded thoughtfully. He hated the way she turned red, as if she were an attractive young lady flirting with an equal. She wasn't bad, but she was gutter trash. His only interest in her was purely academic. "Come, we'll try it." He held out a piece of chalk to her, and motioned to a clean portion of the brick wall. "I will think of something, and I want you to write or draw what you think I'm thinking."

Deborah took the chalk, shaking with nerves. "I don't know how to write or read," she said, to his utter lack of surprise.

"Just copy what you see," he told her with more patience than he felt. He sincerely hoped he wouldn't have to teach this woman to read to do further experiments. He didn't care about her station in regard to her education, but he didn't care to spend that much more time with her. He was getting anxious to look into her brain, to see what was so different about her.

He stepped back as she approached the wall, and focused in on a simple equation, the Pythagorean theorem. Something easy. Something she couldn't mess up, if indeed she could read minds.

After a few heartbeats, Deborah began to write, making a clumsy lower case 'a', followed by a two, then a 'b' that looked more like an abstract duck, another two, then an equal sign and an 'o' followed by one last two. It wasn't quite right, but it was close enough for someone who had no idea how to write trying to copy what they saw. And who knew how clearly she saw that.

Still, it was amazing. She had utterly no education, and she'd written roughly the Pythagorean theorem just from reading his mind.

"I have one last test," he said, not commenting on how she'd done. She looked at him with a nervous-looking smile. "Come here, look on the floor in the middle of the room.

She did as she was instructing, staring in awe at the detailed transmutation circle he'd drawn across the whole of the floor. "What's it for?"

"I'm hoping it will let me replicate what is different about your brain that gives you these abilities so I can study what causes them," he explained. That wasn't entirely true; replication would come later. For now, it would deconstruct her brain for him to base elements so he could see what caused these abilities. But she didn't need to know that.

She wrung her hands. "How does it work?"

He looked at her over his glasses. "Do you really want a scientific explanation?" he asked. After a moment, she shook her head. "Now, I need you to lie down in the center of the circle. Don't worry, this won't hurt."

Deborah looked at him one last time, then did as she was told, stepping into the center and lying down. Once she was positioned correctly to his satisfaction, he stepped out of the circle, and knelt beside it. He repressed his excitement as he touched the edges of the array, activating it.

The transmutation glowed brilliantly gold, alchemical energy arching off the lines he'd drawn so perfectly. Deborah looked over at him with a positively wretched look, then her eyes went wide as the light turned to an ugly violet. A loud staticky noise filled the room as beakers broke and papers flew everywhere.

Deborah's body contorted, then stretched, ballooned up impossibly, then Hohenheim's world turned to an ugly shade of yellow. Sensing something behind him, he turned to come face to face with a giant door. "What is this?" he shouted, looking around for any sign of his laboratory.

There was nothing to see anywhere but stretches of palest gold.

Deborah, or what was left of her, lay in front of him, between himself and the doors, and he watched in horrified fascination as the doors creaked open and silk-black hands slid out, caressing the body, then disappeared, taking the body with them. Eyes from within the inky blackness within the doors stared out at him.

Then everything went dark.

* * *

><p>"Hohenheim?"<p>

The sound of a woman's voice- pleasing to his ears- roused him from his stupor. He cracked open one eye to find Deborah kneeling over him. She teared up. "Oh thank God, you're alive," she said, reaching across him to grasp his shoulder. "Can you sit?"

Reluctantly, painfully, he sat up. Something inside was missing, he could tell, could feel the ache and the blood. That door had taken something. It hadn't just been a hallucination. His laboratory was a wreck around them, and once he was sitting, he felt the urge to vomit.

"Let me get you some water," she said, getting up and walking away. How she could move, he couldn't be certain. He felt weak, and something was missing. How was she even still alive? That door had taken her in, and there hadn't been much left of her at the time. What had it done to her?

For that matter, what _was_ it? Some sort of truth, something he couldn't quite put into words, but he knew, nonetheless. That thing was God somehow. The god of alchemy. The source, the All.

But none of that explained that thing. Or what it'd taken from him.

Deborah came back, putting some broken glass on the ground. She pressed her hands together, then touched the glass. He watched in bleary-eyed amazement as alchemical energy sparked from her unmarked hands, with no circle to start the transmutation, and the broken glass formed a drinking glass. The air shimmered, then he sensed as the humidity in the air condensed and filled the glass with water.

"Here," she said, holding up the glass to his lips.

He took a drink, coughed, spat blood, then stared at her again. "How did you do that?"

She forced him to take another drink, the used the sleeves of her dress to wipe away the blood. "It's alchemy, how else?" she demanded, voice and tone more aggressive and decisive and everything she hadn't been up to that point than he'd ever heard from her. "Can't you do it? You saw that door too, didn't you? I thought I saw you."

But how? She'd been dead, gnarled remains of a human being! This was impossible. "What's going on?" He gave her a stern look. "You never told me you could do alchemy."

Deborah stared at him. "When would I have?" she asked. "I haven't even seen you before you approached the door and pulled me out. Don't be mistaking me for any other woman," she said. "I'm what you asked for, and you got me. Now, drink your water, let's go see a doctor, and then you can tell me who I'm supposed to be to you and why I know your name."

His head spun. This was impossible! She looked exactly like Deborah, but she was whole and well, and talking about the doors as if she'd been there her whole life! And doing alchemy without an array, no less! Although, the more he thought about it, the more he realized, so could he now. His mind felt crowded with information, information he struggled to make sense of.

It was impossible. He'd performed a human transmutation on her. She should be dead, with the secrets of her psychic abilities in his hands. Not well and alive and performing alchemy without a circle as if she'd been studying her whole life.

"A doctor, yes, but first, tell me. Do you know what I'm thinking?" He had to test. If she now where both a psychic and an alchemist, he'd kill her himself. Nothing would surpass him, certainly not some little gutter trash girl.

She gave him a stern look. "No, why would I? Stop playing around, Hohenheim, let's get you to a doctor. The doors took something from you, and you should be treated. Do you know what's missing?"

He didn't. How did she know that, though, that something was gone? It was like she'd traded her gifts for alchemical ones. And she was acting like someone new, someone who felt she belonged to him instead of a mousey girl indebted to him, like she'd been acting.

"Do you know who you are?" he finally asked. He had to know. She claimed she'd been waiting in the doors, perhaps he'd somehow recreated her entirely, from the ground up, creating a new person, maybe one that might finally be his intellectual equal, if her ability to transmute without a circle proved anything.

She started to answer, that stubborn scowl on her face, but it faded. "I- no. No, I don't." She looked at him. "Then I suppose you'd better name me, hm?"

A new person, a new alchemist who could do what nobody else could. Knew what nobody else knew. Pulled from the gates of Hell. He nodded, carefully getting to his feet with her help. "Then I'll call you Dante," he said. "Now, let's get me to a doctor, so we can get back to work, Dante."

Dante smiled. "That's more like it. We have much to learn together."


End file.
